What role does valence play? Reggeaton is more positive and energetic than German Hip Hop.

Here is the first visualization I created for my research. It compares the valence on the x-axis to the energy of the song on the y-axis. You can clearly see that there is more variance and distribution within the German songs than within the Reggeaton songs.

As I described in my own expectations, Reggeaton songs, to me, sound very positive and as the visualization shows, German songs vary regarding valence while almost all the Reggeaton songs score very high on it. What we can also see is that both genres are quite energetic although, I think, this energy could be interpreted differently for both of them. The energy in German songs to me, seems more aggressive than the energy in Reggeaton songs. This might also be visualized in the graph, as the German songs are also distributed more central than the Reggeaton songs.

Overall, from this result, I would summarise Reggeaton songs as more positive and more energetic than German Hip Hop songs. This positivity and energy might also be one of the reasons why Reggeaton is so popular among many people all around the world. Its positive and energetic vibe spreads a good mood and the language of the songs does not seem to matter in this regard. German Hip Hop songs, on the other hand, might also be very energetic but in a different way and differ in valence. We will use these findings to encounter more about our research question.

Is variation the key to success? There is more variety in notes for Reggeaton songs.

German song “Mios mit Bars” by Luciano

Reggeaton song “En la Cama” by Nicky Jam feat. Daddy Yankee

I created these two Chromagrams choosing the first song of each playlist. Looking at them at first sight, you might not see big differences. But looking closer, we can see that the first song “Mios mit Bars” by Luciano from the German Hip Hop Playlist is mostly played in A and not that much in G#, G and F#. Additionally, we can see that in the beginning and the end of the measured time of the Chromagram for a lot of notes the magnitude is very low. When looking at the second Chromagram visualizing the song “En la Cama” by Nicky Jam featuring Daddy Yankee, we can see that the magnitude is higher for almost all notes. Also, the ending and beginning measured for this song’s chromagram do not exhibit such striking lower magnitude as the German song.

From these visualizations we might, therefore, conclude that the variety of notes and therefore sounds in the Reggaeton song might lead to more popularity among listeners from all around the world than the more monotonous sound of the German song.

Again variety plays a big role: Diversity in timbre could be a characteristic of Reggeaton songs.

German Hip Hop outlier - Wenn der Vorhang fällt (feat.Wasi) by Freundeskreis

Reggeaton outlier - No Le Temas a el Beat by Trebol Clan and Hector & Tito

For the cepstograms and the following self-similarity matrices, I chose the two outliers of the playlists. To also look at a less typical song.

When comparing the cepstograms regarding timbre we can see that the magnitude for the Reggeaton song is much less distributed than the magnitude for the German song. The Reggeaton song emphasizes on the coefficients c01 to c06, while the German song highlights c03.

As already mentioned these two songs are outliers for the actual genres and I chose them because, on the first graph of this portfolio, the Reggeaton outlier lays in the area where typical German songs lie and vice versa. We can, therefore indeed see, that variety in tone and in timbre, as it is not the case for this Reggeaton outlier could be typical for Reggeaton songs and less typical of German Hip Hop songs. This would again confirm our findings on the last tab.

Also, my personal music experiences acknowledge this finding. I perceive German Hip Hop as very monotonous, as it is mostly just rap and not much variation in tone. On the other hand, Reggeaton seems very diverse in its sound, including different parts of each song.

Monotony might be German Hip Hop’s problem.

I found it very interesting to work with these two outliers. Therefore, I also made two two self-similarity matrices of the two outliers and next to them, two typical Reggeaton songs. We can see an obvious difference comparing the two German songs on the left side to the Reggeaton songs on the right side. The self-similarity matrices are again all analyzing on timbre. I tried different distances for each matrix and choose the one that created the clearest visualization.

When analyzing the graphs, we can clearly see, that the German songs again have this monotonous sound, as there is not a lot of change in timbre throughout the song and only the beginning and the end are emphasized. This can be seen because the visualization is mostly dark throughout the song and yellow parts can almost only be seen at the beginning and the end. For the Reggeaton songs on the other hand, the graphs show more change in timbre. Especially for “No le Temas a el Beat” by Trebol Clan and Hector&Tito, there is much more yellow, so change in timbre showed, although there also seems to be a clear pattern.

What can also be seen with those graphs, and what I also noticed myself when listening to Reggeaton, that Reggaeton songs immediately start with their typical timbre and it changes throughout the song but follows a specific pattern. German Hip Hop songs mostly start and end differently, often more silent, than they sound in the during the middle of the song.

Reggeaton songs follow a pattern causing repetition. What is it?

Here we have two Keygrams and below two Chordograms. We are analyzing the Reggeaton song “Ginza-Remix” by J Balvin and the German song “Die Abrechnung” by Eko Fresh & German Dream Allstars. We can see that there are some differences between the two songs. I chose these two songs randomly from the playlists to present typical songs of each genre.

Observing the four visualizations, we can see that for the Reggeaton song “Ginza” by J Balvin there is an emphasize on the last seconds of the song. Also, Eb major is stressed in both the Chordo- and the Keygram. It also seems like every 100 seconds there is an emphasis on specific notes. For the German song “Die Abrechnung” we can see differences between the Chordo- and the Keygram which show the complete opposite: As the beginning of the song in the Chordogram is stressed it is not emphasized at all for the Keygram. There also seems to be a pattern, but a less symmetrical one than for the Reggeaton song. This could again be a sign for the specific beat in Reggeaton songs causing a repetition.

Reggeaton songs do not change a lot in tempo compared to German Hip Hop songs. Is this a typical characteristic?

This first graph is a track-level summary comparing our two genres Reggeaton and German Hip-Hop especially looking at the tempo. Additionally features like volume, duration and genre are mentioned in the legend and presented in the graph.

The features loudness and duration might not show very important results, but it is important for us to exclude them as reasons for Reggeaton’s popularity. The loudness seems to be similar, although lower than I expected, for both genres. Maybe one can say that Reggaeton songs are a little louder than the German Hip Hop songs. The duration of Reggeaton songs seems to be a bit longer than for German songs. Therefore, we can see these as similarities between our two genres.

Looking at it more deeply we can see that again, the Reggeaton songs are much less distributed on the graph than the German Hip-Hop songs. Although I would have expected the mean tempo to be higher for both genres, we can see that Reggaeton songs are all positioned in the lower left part of the graph while the German songs are also lower in tempo but more distributed towards the middle. I lead this back to my own assumption that a specific beat, or more fitting, in this case, tempo in Reggeaton songs might be a reason for its likeability. This characteristic might have a specific recognition factor.

In summary: German Hip-Hop is similar in terms of duration and volume but it varies more for tempo, while Reggeaton songs feature a specific, characteristic tempo. This could again be another reason for Reggaetons popularity.

The second graph concentrates on the averages of timbre coefficients in both genres and compares them. We can see that for some timbre coefficients the two genres are very similar, while for others they are very different. Again some coefficients show that Reggeaton has more variation here in the average of timbre coefficients. Especially for c02 and c03 we can see the biggest differences between the two genres.

That characteristic Reggeaton beat might be a reason for moving us and making us like it.

Here I am presenting two tempograms for each song, that was chosen as a typical one for each genre based on a graph I created. The two tempograms on the bottom are wrapped into cyclic tempograms. All these four tempograms again analyze the tempo of the songs, which, in my opinion, is one very important feature of both genres.

As we can see for all four tempograms and therefore, for both songs, there can be seen one or two yellow lines in the graph, this line indicates that at this second of the song the probability of having the fitting tempo is high. For our Reggeaton song “Quiero Bailar” we can see one clear line at 95 beats per minute (BPM) and at 380 or 390BPM (four times 95BPM) when looking at the cyclic tempogram. These two lines are quite clear, but we can also see something changed after about 20 seconds of the song. When listening to it, the intro of the song stops at that point and the beat or tempo, that goes throughout the song starts and, as the tempograms also show, it stays like that until the end. This song has a very sudden ending which is very nicely portrayed in our tempograms.

Now looking on the right side, where the tempograms analyze the song German “KRIMINELL” we can see that there are two lines in the upper tempograms: One at about 220BPM and one at about 480BPM. For the second graph we can see one line at 116BPM. These three lines are less clear than the lines we found for the Reggeaton song. We can also spot vague vertical lines at about 15 seconds, 40 seconds, 85 seconds, 110 seconds and 150 seconds. When listening to the song you can detect those changes in tempo, only for the 40 second part I did not hear it. This song also ends quite sudden and especially after the beginning (15 seconds), similarly to the Reggeaton song, there is a clear change in tempo.

I think it is obvious to see from that graph that the tempo is more clear for the Reggeaton song which leads us again to the conclusion that Reggaeton songs have this specific tempo or beat that, as I have already mentioned a couple of times, might be one of the big reasons for its success. The German song, on the other hand, again to me sounds quite monotonous, but has small changes in tempo.

A specific timbre and positivity as a characteristic for Reggeaton music.

I think this graph shows very well that, there is a difference in the two timbre coefficients for German Hip Hop and Reggeaton. It is quite difficult for me to interpret, but what we can see again, is that the Reggeaton songs are all distributed close to one another, while the timbre coefficients for German Hip Hop are much more distributed on the graph. This again concludes, that there is more variety in German Hip Hop, while on the other hand for Reggeaton it is easier to find a typical characteristic.

I also included valence as a feature in this graph as it seems like an important factor, to me but also when analyzing the means and standard distributions, when comparing the two genres. We can also see here, that again for German Hip Hop there is more variety for valence, but more importantly, that Reggaeton songs score very high for valence. This is also what I perceive myself when listening to Reggeaton: A positive vibe.

This second graph is a confusion matrix and when computing the accuracy for these matrices I got an estimate of 0.9. This is quite a good result.

What can we conclude from these results?

Conclusions:

We now come to the end of this portfolio and summarise my findings. Of course, I can only talk about the two playlists that I used for this portfolio. So when I talk about Reggeaton and German Hip Hop in general, I am referring to the playlists.

The first conclusion that we can draw is that both genres are very energetic. I think this energy might be interpreted in two different ways for the two genres, as Reggeaton’s energy could mean that the music is moving and energizing for the listener, while for German Hip Hop the energy could be connected to the aggressive touch in the music but also to its loudness.

I expected Reggeaton to score very high on valence, as I perceive it as very positive. This is also the case: Most Reggeaton songs are very positive, which makes valence, based on our findings, one of Reggeaton’s main characteristics. German Hip Hop songs are very different, some of them are high in valence and others rather low.

Variety diversity and variation are also a word that I used a lot in my analyses. I found variety in notes and timbre for Reggeaton songs when analyzing Chromagrams and Cepstograms. From these I also found that German Hip Hop songs might be more monotonous in sound and notes which might make them less attractive to listeners who do not even understand the language of the song. Also when analyzing keygrams and self-similarity matrices of several songs, I found that is only a little change in timbre, while this was not the case for Reggeaton songs. The matrices and keygrams also showed that a lot of Reggeaton songs have a specific pattern which leads us to the next conclusion.

A specific beat is what I expected and also found some corresponding results for. When analyzing tempograms and other visualizations including tempo, I concluded that the Reggeaton songs I looked at were all very similar in tempo, with some outliers. This specific beat or tempo is also what I notice when listening to Reggeaton and like about it. The beat is always very moving, rousing and danceable. Although when analysing danceability, which expected to be much higher for Reggeaton than for German Hip Hop, the differences were only small. Therefore, I did not include any visualisations about that and conclude that danceability might be a weak point of the spotify API. This characteristic beat is also the main reason I think Reggeaton is so popular.

Coming back to the posters I already presented at the beginning, I think they are a good depiction of the two different music styles. The Reggeaton poster looks very colorful, positive, happy and reminds of party and summer. As also sung about in almost all Reggeaton songs, a woman is depicted on the poster. On the other hand, the German poster is darker, less positive, looks more aggressive and loud. These features also conform to my results.

Putting all this together, additionally one might say that the Spanish language itself is exquisite and might be another factor for Reggeaton’s success. But it is not only the German language and often aggressive lyrics that are making German Hip Hop less attractive to people, but also it’s more monotonous, aggressive and less positive sound. I found that Reggaetons positive, danceable, energetic sound and typical beat or tempo might make people from all around the world enjoy listening to Reggaeton, also among people who do not speak Spanish at all. Reggeaton music is so moving, engaging and spreading a happy summer vibe, that it is more about the song and sound of it, than about what is spoken.

These conclusions might not be specifically beneficial for specific institutions or persons, but I presume that there is not a lot of research on this specific topic. As Reggeaton is currently very popular all around the world, it might be important for music labels or agencies outside Spanish-speaking countries to know about Reggeaton’s popularity.

For future research I would like to go more deeply and concentrate more on features like speechiness, timbre and maybe find some way to visualise German Hip Hop’s monotony.